Eclipse + Academia?

Chris Aniszczyk has put forward a portfolio of ideas on how to
encourage academic participation in the Eclipse ecosystem.

His thoughts include a stronger Eclipse presence at academic
conferences and a list of all academic publications that use
Eclipse technology. He also proposes an “open source technology
incubator” where people could take a project from, and subsequently
build a business. Finally, he considers amending EclipseCon to
accept position papers, which would then be published in an
Eclipse-themed academic journal.

Other ideas that have arisen in reaction to Aniszczyk’s
proposal, are EclipseCon tracks where researchers discuss how
Eclipse tools have impacted their own academic projects.

However, there has been some disagreement, with one blog visitor
pointing to a potential discrepancy between the goals of academia
and the goals of Eclipse. In research, success is measured in terms
of papers published, whereas at Eclipse, success is measured by the
number of users. “And to get papers accepted the software must not
work perfectly – it just has to work “a little” In his opinion,
Eclipse tools that are created in academia, are lacking that final
“polish,” which prevents the academic ecosystem from being a
perfect fit for the Eclipse ecosystem. But, he acknowledges that
some tools born in academia, don’t fit this stereotype and when
this is the case, he approves the tighter integration of Eclipse
and academia suggested by Aniszczyk.

He builds on Aniszczyk’s initial proposal, suggesting that
Eclipse should encourage the community to become “Beta-Users” of
fledgling software being created within academia. He suggests a
“data collector framework” plugin which presents the user with a
pop-up, asking them to share their data with a different open
source project each day. He casts academia as the provider of this
data and Eclipse as the host making it available to all researchers
currently developing with Eclipse.

Finally, he suggests running regular challenges and community
votes, which would encourage researches to create better tools in
the hope of acquiring a “Winner of the Eclipse XY Challenge” banner
at the top of their page.